Very Short Story: Blossoming Blemishes

If you’re not familiar, there’s a writing prompt on Twitter for the writing community with the hashtag vss365. The “vss” stands for “very short story,” and the number is self-explanatory. Each month, a new Twitter user is tasked with posting a new word each day to prompt people. With the 280 characters available in a Tweet, a user has to come up with a story of some sort incorporating the posted word-of-the-day, although because you need to include the hashtag, the story itself is typically 273 characters (if you try to be exact, at least).

It also doesn’t necessarily have to be a story. Some play around with the form and structure by doing poetry or a haiku or whatever else.

For Aug. 26, the prompt word is “permute.”

Here is my entry:

Leah began to see the burn marks on her arm not as a signpost to her past, but as a way to #permute the future —each a blossoming blemish telling the story of where she was going from where she had been. And where she was going was to handle the last remnant of that past. #vss365